Link Exchanges – what are they good for?

Recently a client was forwarded data on some competitors sites. One of the stats that popped out was a site that had a large number of inbound links. And we all know an inbound link is a vote for the site – so how do we get more links!

Well with a very little bit of digging (Google search for “links: competitorsite.com”) it was easy to see that the links were all from link exchanges.

So the competitor had been creating links to their site – which we know can be good. But they have been using a technique called link exchanges – which offers little or no positive benefit. (And violates basic Google linking policies – to see how Google responds to link exchange requests.) How link exchanges work is that you link to their website and they in turn link to your website.

The links were all from sites whose names will not be repeated here… This is essentially the web version of having a scruffy person on a street corner with a billboard for your company.

How we perform link building at Trionia is a little more time consuming, but here is a good article that describes how to get good links: